$43 billion takeover bid reveals leftist anxieties over free expression
News Thursday morning that the world's most successful African American has offered to buy Twitter and take it private has surfaced widespread anxieties within the globalist class that free speech and even societal peace will be jeopardized if the Tesla CEO lifts content restrictions from journalists' favorite social media platform.
"I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter," wrote Max Boot, columnist for
The (billionaire Bezos–owned)
Washington Post, on Twitter. "He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less."
"For somebody with a lot of money to just come in and say, 'Look, I'm going to buy a part of this company, and therefore my voice as to how your rules are adopted and enforced is going to have more power than anybody else's' — I think that's regressive after years of trying to make sensible rules," University of California, Irvine, law professor and former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression David Kaye was quote. "Twitter has stepped away from this idea of it being the free speech wing of the free speech party, and being a more realistic custodian of speech on the platform."
Those "realistic" and "sensible" rules Twitter has adopted include banning thousands of opponents of globalism (including President Donald Trump), suspending entire news organizations for publishing stories that turned out to be true, creating warning labels for COVID-19 "misinformation," strengthening filters for allegedly threatening speech, and so on.
Twitter may have had libertarian, anything-goes roots, but in the Trump era the company became both the professional plaything and ideological
piñata of the globalist left.
https://reason.com/2022/04/14/gatekeepers-very-afraid-that-elon-musk-will-remove-the-gates-from-twitter/
